Did a censored female writer inspire Hemingway's famous style

The Conversation14 May 2019, 16:34 GMT+10

Virtually everyone has heard of Ernest Hemingway. But youd be hard-pressed to find someone who knows of Ellen N. La Motte.

People should.

She is the extraordinary World War I nurse who wrote like Hemingway before Hemingway. She was arguably the originator of his famous style the first to write about World War I using spare, understated, declarative prose.

Long before Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms in 1929 long before he even graduated high school and left home to volunteer as an ambulance driver in Italy La Motte wrote a collection of interrelated stories titled The Backwash of War.

Published in the fall of 1916, as the war advanced into its third year, the book is based upon La Mottes experience working at a French field hospital on the Western Front.

There are many people to write you of the noble side, the heroic side, the exalted side of war, she wrote. I must write you of what I have seen, the other side, the backwash.

The Backwash of War was immediately banned in England and France for its criticism of the ongoing war. Two years and multiple printings later after being hailed as immortal and Americas greatest work of war writing it was deemed damaging to morale and also censored in wartime America.

For nearly a century, it languished in obscurity. But now, an expanded version of this lost classic that Ive edited has just been published. Featuring the first biography of La Motte, it will hopefully give La Motte the attention she deserves.

Horrors, not heroes

In its time, The Backwash of War was, simply put, incendiary.

As one admiring reader explained in July 1918, There is a corner of my book-shelves which I call my T N T library. Here are all the literary high explosives I can lay my hands on. So far there are only five of them. The Backwash of War was the only one by a woman and also the only one by an American.

In most of the eras wartime works, men willingly fought and died for their cause. The characters were brave, the combat romanticized.

Not so in La Mottes stories. Rather than focus on World War Is heroes, she emphasized its horrors. And the wounded soldiers and civilians she presents in The Backwash of War are fearful of death and fretful in life.

Filling the beds of the field hospital, they are at once grotesque and pathetic. There is a soldier slowly dying from gas gangrene. Another suffers from syphilis, while one patient sobs and sobs because he does not want to die. A 10-year-old Belgian boy is fatally shot through the abdomen by a fragment of German artillery shell and bawls for his mother.

War, to La Motte, is repugnant, repulsive and nonsensical.

The volumes first story immediately sets the tone: When he could stand it no longer, it begins, he fired a revolver up through the roof of his mouth, but he made a mess of it. The soldier is transported, cursing and screaming, to the field hospital. There, through surgery, his life is saved but only so that he can later be court-martialed for his suicide attempt and killed by a firing squad.

After The Backwash of War was published, readers quickly recognized that La Motte had invented a bold new way of writing about war and its horrors. The New York Times reported that her stories were told in sharp, quick sentences that bore no resemblance to conventional literary style and delivered a stern, strong preachment against war.

The Detroit Journal noted she was the first to draw the real portrait of the ravaging beast. And the Los Angeles Times gushed, Nothing like [it] has been written: it is the first realistic glimpse behind the battle lines Miss La Motte has described war not merely war in France but war itself.

La Motte and Gertrude Stein

Together with the famous avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, La Motte seems to have influenced what we now think of as Hemingways signature style his spare, masculine prose.

La Motte and Stein both middle-aged American women, writers and lesbians were already friends at the start of the war. Their friendship deepened during the first winter of the conflict, when they were both living in Paris.

Despite the fact that they each had a romantic partner, Stein seems to have fallen for La Motte. She even wrote a little novelette in early 1915 about La Motte, titled How Could They Marry Her? It repeatedly mentions La Mottes plan to be a war nurse, possibly in Serbia, and includes revealing lines such as Seeing her makes passion plain.

Without a doubt Stein read her beloved friends book; in fact, her personal copy of The Backwash of War is presently archived at Yale University.

Hemingway writes war

Ernest Hemingway wouldnt meet Stein until after the war. But he, like La Motte, found a way to make it to the front lines.

In 1918, Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver and shortly before his 19th birthday was seriously injured by a mortar explosion. He spent five days in a field hospital and then many months in a Red Cross hospital, where he fell in love with an American nurse.

After the war, Hemingway worked as a journalist in Canada and America. Then, determined to become a serious writer, he moved to Paris in late 1921.

In the early 1920s Gertrude Steins literary salon attracted many of the emerging postwar writers, whom she famously labeled the Lost Generation.

Among those who most eagerly sought Steins advice was Hemingway, whose style she significantly influenced.

Gertrude Stein was always right, Hemingway once told a friend. She served as his mentor and became godmother to his son.

Very likely, Stein showed Hemingway her copy of The Backwash of War as an example of admirable war writing. At the very least, she passed along what she had learned from reading La Mottes work.

Whatever the case, the similarity between La Mottes and Hemingways styles is plainly evident. Consider the following passage from the story Alone, in which La Motte strings together declarative sentences, neutral in tone, and lets the underlying horror speak for itself.

Now consider these opening lines from a chapter of Hemingways 1925 collection In Our Time:

So why did Hemingway receive all of the accolades, culminating in a Nobel Prize in 1954 for the influence he exerted on contemporary style, while La Motte was lost to literary oblivion?

Was it the lasting impact of wartime censorship? Was it the prevalent sexism of the postwar era, which viewed war writing as the purview of men?

Whether due to censorship, sexism or a toxic combination of the two, La Motte was silenced and forgotten. Its time to return The Backwash of War to its proper perch as a seminal example of war writing.

Cynthia Wachtell is the editor of a new edition of:

The Backwash of War: An Extraordinary American Nurse in World War I

Johns Hopkins University Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.